


Outlier

by Metronomeblue



Series: Grey Sanctuary [2]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Backstory, Character Development, Does Negan even have a goddamn last name, Erin is Done With This, F/F, F/M, Gen, Harems, Helena is scary, Marriage, Multi, Occasional zombies, Only like a super extended version because I suck at regulating myself, Past Infidelity, Past Relationship(s), Polyamory, Present Infidelity, something between that, something of a character study for Negan, this is bothering me, you know that reaction picture of a person sprinkling stuff in? That's how I am with my zombies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-26
Updated: 2017-01-26
Packaged: 2018-09-20 01:03:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9468545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Metronomeblue/pseuds/Metronomeblue
Summary: Five women (and then some) who Negan married, and one he didn't.





	1. Lucille

**Author's Note:**

> So I actually wrote this first chapter in late November and then just never posted it for some reason, so here it is, very late.

They started out in high school, Negan and Lucille. The two of them were so young; they were apple blossom trees and the dust of summer kicked up on dirty shoes. They were young love and young hate and young love again and then older love and older hate and older than that love and then they were married. It was a quick thing- fast and efficient and laughing all the way like everything else they had to do but maybe didn't want to.

Lucille loved brutal- like razor wire and blunt force and the possessiveness of a thousand women burning in her. She loved hard and fast and forever and she wasn't letting go. Every time he stumbled in smelling like whiskey and another woman she'd throw him down and make him forget anyone else- she'd burn herself into his very skin. She loved him and hated him and was burned apart by burning him.

Negan loved steady- uncompromising and unwavering. Like a candle that burned itself out- predictable in his inconstancy. He'd be caught up in one woman's charm for months, weeks, days- and then he'd move on. He could only give any of them so much of himself before he had to pull away- closing off and brushing them away. But not Lucille. Lucille was the match that lit him again every time- sharp and fast and elusive.

They were Gift of the Magi love- broke and stagnating in what little they had. She gave him leather gloves for Christmas; he gave her a lighter and a gallon of gasoline. They were Prohibition love- him always leaving for another girl's crooked finger, always coming back for her cold eyes and hot anger, her always kissing his cheek where she'd slapped him moments before.

Lucille and Negan were trailer truck love. They were cold beers on Fridays and going to Little League games even though they didn't have kids. They were tough fights and fierce fucking on beds that were too small and too old for the weight of their fury. They were cold hard silence in the hours of the morning, the coming home smelling like another woman's perfume. They were the flatlining of a relationship after a furious dying fit, the quiet after the storm after the calm. 

The cancer diagnosis was what changed things. He couldn't focus on anyone but her, she couldn't raise the strength to be angry at him for it. So instead he held her, wrapping his arms around her thinning waist, pressing his cheek into her weakening hair. She tangled her spindling hands around his neck, inhaling him with uneven breaths. He spent more and more time in weight rooms than in women's beds. She spent more time in hospitals, trying to burn steadily instead of brightly. He spent more time yelling at kids than beating them. She spent more time learning what it was to bleed your life away, steadily and painfully.

When she died, finally, her last breath crackling like dying embers, parts of Negan died too. When he had to kill her, or whatever it was she had become, he stopped caring about those parts. When he realized the world had ended, really ended, he stopped caring about just about everything else, too.


	2. Christine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They all knew Christine was a bad idea- all except Negan, freshly wounded and burning with loss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think Christine looks a little like Natalie Dormer. Because of the cat smile, mostly.

They all knew Christine was a bad idea- all except Negan, freshly wounded and burning with loss. Christine knew, though. Christine always knew.

She had that crooked, catlike smile. The same one he saw in half the girls he'd cheated on his wife with, the same one that promised a good night and a hazy morning. She never did tell him much about herself- he knew she was running, but from what they had no idea. She'd stumbled upon the fledgeling compound, before they'd even started calling it the Sanctuary.

She had keen, cruel eyes and a dark set to her mouth that made her look both angry and amused. Most of the men were afraid of her. Negan was anything but.

They fell into bed together the night she arrived, after a good two bottles of whiskey and a garbled ceremony from a similarly drunken priest. He woke several hours later to find he couldn't move- she drugged him, maybe, and he was impressed and furious all at once.

She was packing all of the supplies she could lay her thieving hands on, and the longer he lay there trying to move, the closer he got to actually doing it. So when she crept back over and pressed a blade to his throats like she meant to cut it open, he grasped her hands and forced them behind her back. 

"Please," she begged, crying. "I'm so afraid of him. I need to run and I can't afford to let you tell him where I'm going," she broke down entirely. "Please!"

He sat her down in front of Simon and Vic, made damn sure they all heard the full story of her crimes. Turns out she'd been playing the same con up the East coast. Marrying men, sleeping with them, drugging them. Killing them for supplies and vehicles. 

They let her leave. They let her make it to the Wellspring grove- where Vic shot her in the head.

Negan and Christine were a mistake. He knew that the moment he watched her walk in the door. He had thought- for a moment, in a haze of drunken fervor and grief like hope- that he could really love her, could bring a return to the part of him burned out by Lucille's death. 

He knew now that that was a lost cause.

Helena had come into town at the same time, as different from Christine as anyone could be. Where Christine had fallen into the compound like a wounded gazelle, Helena walked in like she belonged there. Apparently, she was far less worried about her own personal post-apocalyptic stalker than Christine had been, as she flatly told them ten minutes later that he was less than a day behind her and that all she really needed from them was one bullet.

Negan liked her immensely, despite himself. It seemed unwise, after the Christine debacle, to blindly trust a pretty woman, but that trust was quickly rewarded. (Watching Helena kill her stalker was a much debated event among the Saviors- "was it hot, or was it heartless?" Tended to be the question. Some people simply answered "yes" and left the asker regretting it for the rest of the day.) 

She handed back the gun and walked back into the compound.

Two months later, Negan walked into his office to find Helena sitting there with a laughably well-tended nail file and an unimpressed look on her face.

"You need a wife," she said flatly. "I need a hobby." He grinned. So it was that Helena became not just his first wife, but his first Spymaster- she was remarkably good at hearing things she shouldn't. 

The prestige of having women seek him out was flattering, but it also inflated the image of "Negan"- raised him to a more kingly tier of existence. Helena's particular talent didn't hurt, either. In fact, he executed six leaders of an unfinished coup d'état the first week of their marriage. They didn't sleep together, but he wasn't sure that was a bad thing. She was, after all, more Venus fly trap than woman.

He told her so one day, and she grinned at him like a crocodile

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Helena is, I like to think, a semi-distant relative of Daryl and Merle. A cousin whose family moved to the city, maybe. 
> 
> She's also consciously written as a counterpoint to Christine- both survivors, but Helena retained a certain self-awareness that Christine... didn't.
> 
> Also, I just checked the rough notes for this story and like... sixteen more in the series that I wrote up in December, and I'm actually really excited. There's some cool stuff ahead.


End file.
